Named Groups

The Wolfram Language provides permutation representations for many important finite groups. Some of these groups are members of infinite families, parametrized by one or more integers; other groups are uniquely distinguished by their special properties and are frequently named after their discoverers.

Mathieu Groups

The following five Mathieu groups were the first five sporadic simple groups to be discovered, in the second half of the nineteenth century, and are multiply transitive groups, all being subgroups of the largest one. The Wolfram Language provides default permutation representations for them.

These are the orders of the stabilizers of the points of a base in the group. They correspond to the groups MathieuGroupM24, MathieuGroupM23, MathieuGroupM22, and then three more groups sometimes called Mathieu group , Mathieu group , and Mathieu group , which are not simple. Finally there is the cyclic group of order 3 and the trivial group.

A similar chain is obtained starting from MathieuGroupM12. It contains MathieuGroupM11 and non-simple groups that can be called Mathieu group , Mathieu group , and Mathieu group , with the trivial group at the end.

Other Sporadic Simple Groups

There are 26 sporadic simple groups (27 if the Tits group is included). Apart from the five Mathieu groups, the Wolfram Language provides permutation representations for those of intermediate support length. The largest ones are too big to be handled as permutation groups in practice, and it is more efficient to represent them as matrix groups. These are the 13 groups (including the Tits group) for which representations on domains of less than 50000 points are known.

Some sporadic groups are related to symmetries of the Leech lattice, a particular lattice in a Euclidean 24-dimensional space. These are sometimes known as the "second generation" of the sporadic simple groups.

This is a chain of stabilizers of ConwayGroupCo2, acting on 2300 points. The base has six points only, and hence knowing the images of these six points suffices to uniquely identify each permutation in the group.